We Need These Cover Crops to Grow - Regenerating The Ranch Ep 7 - Regenerative Grazing

we use cover crops to help us to cover a couple different ways it's really applying a couple of the soil Health principles keep the living room in the ground introduce diversity keep the soil covered since of course we like to graze all winter and that helps a bunch those roots have hit that and just gone sideways and that means when water soaks down and hits that it goes sideways as well it doesn't go in we planted this cover crop into a it was a it was a mess there's still a long way to go to make this better that looks almost impermeable the way we fix that is with roots started with 7 across Southern Oklahoma each Ranch property is unique in topography use in history we want to take you along on our journey [Music] showing you the challenges the lessons we've learned and the victories along the way to regenerating the ranch planning cover crops has been a vital part of the forage Management on our Noble ranches find a sun hemp root ball we'll dig a sun hemp fruit ball up in my mind we've been planting cover crops in the pool season on Bermuda grass for decades we just didn't call it that it's not been anything new to overseed something like cereal Rye into Bermuda grass during the winter and and we've called it overseeding it's been a monoculture cool season grass in a monoculture warm season grass we're getting more scientific with it more complex mixes more diversity more intentional and for more reasons rather than just to have additional forage to graze now it's for the forage it's for the soil it's for the health of the livestock it's for the profit so energy cycle water cycle nutrient cycle these cover crops are are mining up nutrients and then those nutrients will be left on the surface this sorghum might be pulling nutrients up from six feet deep and now those nutrients are at the surface when this plant decays at the surface and and can help feed the the future crop grazing crop forage crop cover crop a year ago planted this to soybeans and then just a wheat crop in the fall so we went from monoculture beans to monoculture wheat and then this last summer it's whenever we planted this multi-species cover crop in here in this field like many fields as people are transitioning uh may have been the first time there's been Livestock on this in decades and we see that a lot as as folks are going from maybe a hay Meadow that's just been hay forever now we're reintroducing livestock and that's another one of the soil Health principles is properly integrate livestock and so a lot of folks are at the early stages of that right now there's still a long way to go to make this better that looks almost impermeable those roots have hit that and just gone sideways and that means when water soaks down and hits that it goes sideways as well it doesn't go in the way we fix that is with roots with a diversity of roots with an abundance of roots to feed the biology it does have just a little bit of an aroma yeah it does a little bit of a soil smell and I would expect a year ago if we were in this same field one year ago this would have just smelled like dirt just like dust on your windowsill I I would expect foreign from a hard drought spell we are trusting we will see some rain this fall we are planning out our fall planning for cool season cover crops so this fall we've adapted our plan we really need to have foraged for the cows to graze we had 60 days of no significant rain during our growing season so right now we're really focusing on growing what we feel pretty confident we can grow getting it up being able to graze it and put it back down we needed a cool season mix in here so we have something to put in front of animals so we have that animal impact there can be a lot of reasons for whatever mix a person chooses and I'm always going to refer back to the ecosystem processes and diversity and maximizing the nutrient cycling water cycling energy cycle but also the soil Health principles of integrate plant diversity and armor of the soil but price absolutely and availability the Dependable ones are the small grains veg peas clover chicory plantain those are all winter hardy winter winter tolerant it's interesting I believe the cover crop mix that was planted in this field and the cover crop mix planted in probably all of the fields this summer were the same at least on this farm and in each field we see a little bit different expression of what did the best that's one thing I like about a mix if if I had planted all Sun hemp in this field I might not have much of a crop and if I had planted all Pearl Millet in the other field I might not have much of a crop but with that mix it can adapt because we never know what Mother Nature is going to throw at us one year to the next so we're we're no-till drilling this and we're planting green our cover crop or summer cover or forage or whatever you want to call it at this point it's still green and growing if we were to terminate this some way with chemical or wait until Frost we could potentially have two weeks that there's nothing growing here and so that biology is going to be on a Jenny Craig diet during that time this way that biology that's in the soil is is always being fed by the root exudates from growing plants ideally the Holy Grail might be if our cover crop seed was allowed to mature and we made enough seed that that we had so much that even with what dies during the winter comes up in the fall and dies or what doesn't survive the winter that it would reseed itself and then volunteer come back on their own next year and have a cover crop that we didn't even have to plant that would be that'd be great think of the cost savings that would be typically we utilize a no-till drill to plant our cover crops we are testing something a little bit different that we have found a little success with on a couple of our pastures good morning we're here at the Red River we're here in pasture 33 and 34. the cows are about two days away from this pasture we're gonna move them in here and so we're going to go ahead and just spread the seed and get it on the ground and then we'll we'll run them through here and we'll probably be in between 30 to 50 000 pounds of stock density nothing real big but uh try to trample it in and see if we can make it work this year like we did last year traditionally we usually plant these cover crops cool season cover crops with the no-till drill basically what a no-trail drill does it'll cut a small Furrow drop the seed in the soil maybe one inches deep or so then it'll come back with a press wheel press it down and then it'll come back with a cover wheel and cover it up here what we're doing with this spreader we're just basically doing the same thing except for we're going to do it with the cows we're going to spread it out bring the cows in here is some decent stock density let them Chomp it down and hopefully get seed to soil contact and hopefully get a rain on it get it up there's some areas here that are really really rough that if we can make this work like we want to that it would be a whole lot better than trying to pull a drill across it there's areas down here in these pecan Orchards that it would be a whole lot easier just to broadcast it and use the cows to plant it than it would be to try to have to run a drill under the trees and all that plus you know some people don't have a no-till drill no-till drill is expensive person could go down to his Co-op and rent a spreader and and and do this on his own he could even do it with his pickup you know so let's pick up the cows so that that's that's one big Advantage I see of it and on the theme of trying new things we're looking for other alternatives to help us grow more forage instead of relying on chemical fertilizer and that's when we came across this pelleted composted chicken litter was supposed to be more biologically available it's going to be easier for us to handle and spread doesn't smell like just straight chicken litter and it's supposed to stay in the soil and keep giving you benefits for several years so we've pulled the trigger and we're going to try some of that this year in some test areas and I have really high hopes for it I mean I'd like to put it in lots of places if it works good just kind of jump starts our biology here we are this morning Red River got to first load of poultry litter in yesterday don't have a whole lot of experience with it we've used lots of synthetic fertilizers through the years on this Ranch this year we're going to try to use some chicken litter and just play with it and see how it turns out it's kind of like a Time release so you'll get part of the good out of it this fall part of the good out of it this spring and then maybe even some more good out of it next fall it's not just a one-time and you're done thing I'm on a put down about a thousand pounds to the acre on a about 60 Acres over here hopefully it'll kick off some of the biology in the soil and and get some things working and see how we get along I think the poultry leader is probably going to do a whole lot better things for the soil than than the synthetic fertilizers do it can help us start some biology and and then we can come back and keep it going with our grazing the pelleted composted chicken litter that we're buying is more expensive than conventional fertilizer but we're also hoping to get several years of use out of one application so if we spread the cost over several years it ends up being cheaper than applying chemical fertilizer every year everybody that we've talked to swears by it and swears the biology is is worth the price this past year we've really struggled with our cover crops even from the winter of 2021 we just had a really dry winter and then the spring was more the same we planted had a little bit emerge and we never got the rain to get them to grow so they've been sitting out there for two and a half months and now that we've finally got some rain we're starting to see some of our warm season cover crops starting to grow up and be grazable now that we're ready to start planning our cool season cover crops if we don't get a good stand of this fall cover crop it would set us back and we might have to sell some bread cows but I don't think we're relying on it as heavily as we would have if we hadn't made our pre or pre-plans for the drought but things really turned around in the last 45 days with the rain that we've had and the cover crops were a great success we'd be able to keep a lot more bread animals around maybe buy some undervalued animals and begin to stalk the ranch back up because from an average standpoint I think we're still under stocked this has just been bad year for grass so if everything goes back hopefully we can build back up and be ready for higher prices next year

Channel: Noble Research Institute

Views: 49,326

Keywords: agruculture, cattle health, climate change, climate variability, cover crops, cover crops for grazing, cover crops no till, drought, farming, grazing, grazing in the grass, herd health, holistic grazing, pasture land, pasture management, ranch, ranching, regenerating, regenerative, regenerative agriculture, regenerative farming, regenerative ranching, soil health, sustainability, sustainable farming

Id: 94kf0jE9Cgo

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 14 2023